Design Summary & Analysis Draft 3

   The article “How Flying Robots Might Prevent Deforestation” (Peck, 2012) mentioned the purpose, features and effectiveness of quadrotors, mainly focused on them being “sentinels of crucial environmental protection”. These “miniature flying robots” were programmed to inspect the surroundings of the rainforest independently, providing advanced feedback for unlicensed activities and largely diminishing the desire of those people who considered carrying out unlawful acts such as "cutting down trees and drug trafficking". According to Peck, Vijay Kumar, the developer of the Quadrotors, highlighted the robots’ ability to efficiently function together as a team without a need for any communication. Furthermore, quadrotors were equipped with “little rotor blades'' for easy gliding action, and the programmed commands on the “onboard processor” would call for immediate response to any difference in their surroundings. According to Peck, Mario Campos, a professor of computer science, claimed that although quadrotors were deemed as valuable bots, we have to be mindful when utilising these robots extensively as there could be a possibility of them endangering the wildlife.

Flying Robots are useful in guarding the forest against deforestation and people who use the forest as a disguise to do illegal activities. However, more analyses need to be done to understand the impact that the flying robots bring to the ecosystem that they are safeguarding.

One of the benefits of using drones in the forest is to enable us to have a greater understanding of the forest through 3D mapping of the terrain of the forest. This is done by flying the drones through the forest to scan and capture the different features of the forest. Next, the software will generate the 3D map of the forest-based on the information collected by the flying robots. An instance of the usage of the 3D map will be the planting of mangrove trees in Myanmar. According to the article "Drones in Forestry: How are UAVs making a difference?" (Jackson, 2020), a non-profit organisation called Worldview International was only able to plant less than "three square miles of mangrove saplings" prior to the adoption of drones. Currently, the organisation's target is to be able to plant 400,000 trees per day with the assistance of drones. As a result of an increased in the knowledge of the forest, the stakeholders, such as the government, researchers and organisations can have an easier time for forest planning and conservation.

Another advantage of employing drones in the forest is for detecting early forest fire so that necessary actions can be taken to reduce the spread of forest fire swiftly and save as much of the ecosystem as possible. According to the article "The Amazon is being decimated. How could tech have prevented it?" (Gan, 2019), many forests in the world are burning. Gan mention that the Amazon Rainforest had burned for more than three weeks which caused damage to the habitat of "10% of the world’s animal and plant species". Likewise, forest fire in many other places such as Canary Island, Siberia and Alaska also caused large scale destruction to the forests. Hence, early detection of forest fire using flying robots is extremely important to prevent a small fire from spreading into a large scale forest fire which can cause irreversible damage to the forest.

Although there are many advantages like those mention in the previous paragraphs, there are also drawbacks to using drones in the forest. Since the drones are operating without any human control, there will be a risk of them harming the ecosystem in the forest if the drones were to malfunction as they can go out of control and crash into anything. According to the article "Swiss drone crashes near children, forcing the suspension of a delivery program" (Porter, 2019), a drone that was doing delivery crashed near a group of children even though an emergency parachute was attached to it. Porter mentioned that during the emergency landing, the connecting cord was cut off by the drone which led to the crash. Therefore it is important for developers that are developing drones to be used in the forest to ensure that enough safety measures are implemented on the drones before using the drones to monitor the forest on a large scale.

In conclusion, despite having some disadvantages, the overall impact of deploying flying robots in the forest is positive if people were to stay cautious by looking out for the possible problem and bringing the risk to as low level as possible.

            References: 

            Gan, J. (2019, August 28). The Amazon is being decimated. How could tech have prevented it? AgFunderNews. https://agfundernews.com/the-amazon-is-being-decimated-how-could-tech-have-prevented-it.html

            Jackson, B. (2020, October 13). Drones in Forestry: How are UAVs making a difference? COPTRZ. https://www.coptrz.com/drones-in-forestry/

            Peck, M. (2016, July 14). How Flying Robots Might Prevent Deforestation. Mashable. https://mashable.com/2012/03/20/flying-robots-deforestation

            Porter, J. (2019, August 2). Swiss drone crashes near children, forcing suspension of delivery program. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/2/20751383/swiss-drone-crash-delivery-program-suspended-matternet-post-hospital-samples#comments



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